A circle of friends connected by gootouchi! The “FIST BUMP” corner of the radio program “GRAND MARQUEE” features people who live and enjoy Tokyo in a relay format.
On July 20, mystery writer Seinan Sato appeared on the program, introduced by novelist Mio Nukaga. We asked her about how she came to Tokyo to become a musician but failed and how she started writing novels, which she said she had never read before, and about her latest work “Zanzan” (Afterglow).
INDEX
He will only live to be 27.
Takano (MC): Mr. Nukaga introduced Mr. Sato as “a caring older brother in the publishing industry. You yourself tweeted on Twitter that you “might be a bit aware of it.
Sato: That’s right. I tend to get involved in things that I shouldn’t get involved in.
Takano: If I enter the publishing industry, I would like to be taken care of.
Celeina (MC): Mr. Sato, you were a musician before you became a novelist.
Takano: That’s a great profile.
Sato: But I wasn’t making a decent living, so I was working part-time all the time. My hometown is Nagasaki, but I came to Tokyo to enter a music school. I entered the guitar department of MI JAPAN in Shibuya, and after graduation I played in a band.
Takano: What kind of music were you playing at the time?
Sato: I really loved loud music, but I wanted to sell well, so I played music that was in the vein of J-POP, like Miss Chill and Spitz (laughs).
Takano: That’s good, it’s very explicit (laughs).
Celeina: You are a businessman.
Takano: I was going to be a musician, and now I’m a writer.
Celeina: What made you decide to write a novel?
Sato: Before I moved to Tokyo, I thought I would only live to be about 27 years old.
Takano: Is that like Kurt Cobain, by any chance?
Sato: That’s right (laughs). Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix died at the age of 27, so I thought that I would be successful in music and live only until I was 27 years old.
But when I actually came to Tokyo, I found that I was not as successful as I thought I would be, and it seemed as if my life would go on. I had not thought about the future at all, and I began to feel as if I was in trouble. My band activities were not going well. I had no more time to do anything else, so I started buying novels at the book-off store and reading them. I had never read a novel before.
Takano: So that’s how it all started.
Sato: That’s right. I read them and found them interesting.
Celeina: I read it as a form of entertainment, and I was hooked.
Sato: Yes. It was like escaping from reality. Everything was going wrong and I had no money, so I bought a novel for 100 yen at a book-off store and read it.
